"Roster Share," a service in which NCAA Football 13 players trade edited rosters over EA Sports servers, has been down for a few days on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. This has given rise to conspiracy rumors that EA has spiked the feature, especially as it's tied to a use-of-likeness lawsuit brought by former college players.

Advertisement

Reached last night, an EA Sports representative said that the NCAA Football 13 development team noticed only late Friday that the feature was down. "We've got people looking into it," he said. Between the lines, it means this wasn't killed off as some sort of ass-covering move related to the college players' litigation.

If EA really had any intention of doing that, it would have done so before now, and probably before the game's release. However, last month, case documents did reveal that EA Sports developers would use fully named files in building out the base roster for the coming year, then strip the names out so as not to run afoul of NCAA amateurism regulations that forbid such an identification. The players' lawsuit says it doesn't matter, they are basically identifiable in these video games in every other way.

EA Sports used the real names of college players when coding its NCAA rosters internally and the…
Read more Read more

"Roster Share" emerged as a workaround five years ago, after EA Sports broached the idea of getting accurately named rosters onto the disc itself, and was rebuffed. The sharing feature replaced the old trade-by-mail system that involved sending someone a memory card and usually paying a contribution for their work.